You trained smart and hard, but still: there were holes in your training. Yoga and Pilates didn’t quite round out the program the way your old world dance teachers thought it would. Walking into the gym and following an online workout routine sounded like a good idea—your proprioception is off the charts, everyone goes to the gym, even the muggles, how hard could it be?— but the truth is, you never truly learned how to train for strength and functional mobility.
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Strength training was reserved, at best, for men to bulk up aesthetically for a role. Women were confined to pink dumbbells out of fear of turning into the hulk. And even if you managed to move beyond all that noise, strength wasn’t taught with a dancer’s brilliantly sneaky compensations in mind. There are certain patterns you’ve worked so hard to develop, you may not even recognize the possible eventual harm/injury/pain they might cause.
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A reflection:⠀
Can you operate your scapula independently of your thoracic and lumbar spine? Can you extend your hip without extending your lumbar? Can you internally rotate your femur? Can you find a standing neutral spine, or are you forever locked into the wistful and beautiful thoracic extension your teachers demanded of you day in and day out? Can you feel your hip flexors in your squats and leg extensions engage, or are you still under the impression that your rotators should do the work of your flexors?
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What if training at the gym wasn’t simply a tool to help you change aesthetically in the name of whatever societal norm you’ve been brainwashed to subscribe to, but actually helped you function better as a human first and a dancer second?